When was the Council of Jerusalem?

Question

Accepted Answer

About AD 49, between Paul's first missionary journey and his second: most scholars put it in 48 or 49, a few in 50 or 51. The map stands at Jerusalem in c. AD 49. The dispute began in Antioch, about 500 km north of Jerusalem in a straight line, where men from Judea taught the Gentile converts, “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” After Peter's speech to the apostles and elders, James gave the ruling, “that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God”. The letter sent back by Judas Barsabas and Silas “unto the brethren which are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia” asked only “that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication”; some ancient manuscripts add the golden rule. Paul then carried the decrees through the cities of his second journey. In Galatians he tells of going up to Jerusalem “fourteen years after” with Barnabas and Titus, when James, Cephas and John “gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship”, asking only that they remember the poor; most scholars take this to be the same meeting, while others identify it with the earlier famine visit of Acts 11 and date Galatians before the council. Luke gives no year, so the date is reckoned from the one fixed point in Paul's life. A letter of Claudius inscribed at Delphi, dated AD 51/52, shows that Gallio was proconsul of Achaia from the summer of 51; Paul was brought before him at Corinth, where he spent eighteen months, so he had come there about the beginning of 50, after travelling through Asia Minor and Macedonia. That puts the council and the start of the second journey in 49 or late 48. The famine of Acts 11, which Josephus sets under the procurators Fadus and Tiberius Alexander, about 46–48, and Claudius's expulsion of the Jews from Rome about 49, after which Aquila and Priscilla had “lately come from Italy” when Paul met them in Corinth, fit the same frame; counting the “fourteen years” of Galatians from Paul's conversion about 33 or 34 gives 47 or 48, from his first visit to Jerusalem three years later, 50 or 51.